A SHIP in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the
appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free
spirit put under restraint. Chain cables and stout ropes keep her bound
to stone posts at the edge of a paved shore, and a berthing-master, with
brass buttons on his coat, walks about like a weather-beaten and ruddy
gaoler, casting jealous, watchful glances upon the moorings that fetter a
ship lying passive and still and safe, as if lost in deep regrets of her
days of liberty and danger on the sea.
The swarm of renegades—dock-masters, berthing-masters, gatemen, and such
like—appear to nurse an immense distrust of the captive ship’s
resignation. There never seem chains and ropes enough to satisfy their
minds concerned with the safe binding of free ships to the strong, muddy,
enslaved earth. “You had better put another bight of a hawser astern,
Mr. Mate,” is the usual phrase in their mouth. I brand them for
renegades, because most of them have been sailors in their time. As if
the infirmities of old age—the gray hair, the wrinkles at the corners of
the eyes, and the knotted veins of the hands—were the symptoms of moral
poison, they prowl about the quays with an underhand air of gloating over
the broken spirit of noble captives. They want more fenders, more
breasting-ropes; they want more springs, more shackles, more fetters;
they want to make ships with volatile souls as motionless as square
blocks of stone. They stand on the mud of pavements, these degraded
sea-dogs, with long lines of railway-trucks clanking their couplings
behind their backs, and run malevolent glances over your ship from
headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the poor creature
under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care. Here and there
cargo cranes looking like instruments of torture for ships swing cruel
hooks at the end of long chains. Gangs of dock-labourers swarm with
muddy feet over the gangways. It is a moving sight this, of so many men
of the earth, earthy, who never cared anything for a ship, trampling
unconcerned, brutal and hob-nailed upon her helpless body.
Fortunately, nothing can deface the beauty of a ship. That sense of a
dungeon, that sense of a horrible and degrading misfortune overtaking a
creature fair to see and safe to trust, attaches only to ships moored in
the docks of great European ports. You feel that they are dishonestly
locked up, to be hunted about from wharf to wharf on a dark, greasy,
square pool of black water as a brutal reward at the end of a faithful
voyage.
A ship anchored in an open roadstead, with cargo-lighters alongside and
her own tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is accomplishing in
freedom a function of her life. There is no restraint; there is space:
clear water around her, and a clear sky above her mastheads, with a
landscape of green hills and charming bays opening around her anchorage.
She is not abandoned by her own men to the tender mercies of shore
people. She still shelters, and is looked after by, her own little
devoted band, and you feel that presently she will glide between the
headlands and disappear. It is only at home, in dock, that she lies
abandoned, shut off from freedom by all the artifices of men that think
of quick despatch and profitable freights. It is only then that the
odious, rectangular shadows of walls and roofs fall upon her decks, with
showers of soot.
To a man who has never seen the extraordinary nobility, strength, and
grace that the devoted generations of ship-builders have evolved from
some pure nooks of their simple souls, the sight that could be seen
five-and-twenty years ago of a large fleet of clippers moored along the
north side of the New South Dock was an inspiring spectacle. Then there
was a quarter of a mile of them, from the iron dockyard-gates guarded by
policemen, in a long, forest-like perspective of masts, moored two and
two to many stout wooden jetties. Their spars dwarfed with their
loftiness the corrugated-iron sheds, their jibbooms extended far over the
shore, their white-and-gold figure-heads, almost dazzling in their
purity, overhung the straight, long quay above the mud and dirt of the
wharfside, with the busy figures of groups and single men moving to and
fro, restless and grimy under their soaring immobility.
At tide-time you would see one of the loaded ships with battened-down
hatches drop out of the ranks and float in the clear space of the dock,
held by lines dark and slender, like the first threads of a spider’s web,
extending from her bows and her quarters to the mooring-posts on shore.
There, graceful and still, like a bird ready to spread its wings, she
waited till, at the opening of the gates, a tug or two would hurry in
noisily, hovering round her with an air of fuss and solicitude, and take
her out into the river, tending, shepherding her through open bridges,
through dam-like gates between the flat pier-heads, with a bit of green
lawn surrounded by gravel and a white signal-mast with yard and gaff,
flying a couple of dingy blue, red, or white flags.
This New South Dock (it was its official name), round which my earlier
professional memories are centred, belongs to the group of West India
Docks, together with two smaller and much older basins called Import and
Export respectively, both with the greatness of their trade departed from
them already. Picturesque and clean as docks go, these twin basins
spread side by side the dark lustre of their glassy water, sparely
peopled by a few ships laid up on buoys or tucked far away from each
other at the end of sheds in the corners of empty quays, where they
seemed to slumber quietly remote, untouched by the bustle of men’s
affairs—in retreat rather than in captivity. They were quaint and
sympathetic, those two homely basins, unfurnished and silent, with no
aggressive display of cranes, no apparatus of hurry and work on their
narrow shores. No railway-lines cumbered them. The knots of labourers
trooping in clumsily round the corners of cargo-sheds to eat their food
in peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs had the air of picnicking by the
side of a lonely mountain pool. They were restful (and I should say very
unprofitable), those basins, where the chief officer of one of the ships
involved in the harassing, strenuous, noisy activity of the New South
Dock only a few yards away could escape in the dinner-hour to stroll,
unhampered by men and affairs, meditating (if he chose) on the vanity of
all things human. At one time they must have been full of good old slow
West Indiamen of the square-stern type, that took their captivity, one
imagines, as stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the waves with
their blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, or
logwood sedately with their own winch and tackle. But when I knew them,
of exports there was never a sign that one could detect; and all the
imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes of tropical timber,
enormous baulks roughed out of iron trunks grown in the woods about the
Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in stacks of mighty boles, and it was
hard to believe that all this mass of dead and stripped trees had come
out of the flanks of a slender, innocent-looking little barque with, as
likely as not, a homely woman’s name—Ellen this or Annie that—upon her
fine bows. But this is generally the case with a discharged cargo. Once
spread at large over the quay, it looks the most impossible bulk to have
all come there out of that ship alongside.
They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy world of docks, these basins
where it has never been my good luck to get a berth after some more or
less arduous passage. But one could see at a glance that men and ships
were never hustled there. They were so quiet that, remembering them
well, one comes to doubt that they ever existed—places of repose for
tired ships to dream in, places of meditation rather than work, where
wicked ships—the cranky, the lazy, the wet, the bad sea boats, the wild
steerers, the capricious, the pig-headed, the generally
ungovernable—would have full leisure to take count and repent of their
sins, sorrowful and naked, with their rent garments of sailcloth stripped
off them, and with the dust and ashes of the London atmosphere upon their
mastheads. For that the worst of ships would repent if she were ever
given time I make no doubt. I have known too many of them. No ship is
wholly bad; and now that their bodies that had braved so many tempests
have been blown off the face of the sea by a puff of steam, the evil and
the good together into the limbo of things that have served their time,
there can be no harm in affirming that in these vanished generations of
willing servants there never has been one utterly unredeemable soul.
In the New South Dock there was certainly no time for remorse,
introspection, repentance, or any phenomena of inner life either for the
captive ships or for their officers. From six in the morning till six at
night the hard labour of the prison-house, which rewards the valiance of
ships that win the harbour went on steadily, great slings of general
cargo swinging over the rail, to drop plumb into the hatchways at the
sign of the gangway-tender’s hand. The New South Dock was especially a
loading dock for the Colonies in those great (and last) days of smart
wool-clippers, good to look at and—well—exciting to handle. Some of them
were more fair to see than the others; many were (to put it mildly)
somewhat over-masted; all were expected to make good passages; and of all
that line of ships, whose rigging made a thick, enormous network against
the sky, whose brasses flashed almost as far as the eye of the policeman
at the gates could reach, there was hardly one that knew of any other
port amongst all the ports on the wide earth but London and Sydney, or
London and Melbourne, or London and Adelaide, perhaps with Hobart Town
added for those of smaller tonnage. One could almost have believed, as
her gray-whiskered second mate used to say of the old _Duke of S—_, that
they knew the road to the Antipodes better than their own skippers, who,
year in, year out, took them from London—the place of captivity—to some
Australian port where, twenty-five years ago, though moored well and
tight enough to the wooden wharves, they felt themselves no captives, but
honoured guests.